Všechny srdečně zveme na přednášku Vojtěcha Ripla, Counting nouns in Old English: the roots of the category of countability in English.

Přednáška se uskuteční 20.10. ve 12:30 v učebně P010.

Abstract:

The nominal category of countability has been studied by scholars focusing on English linguistics ever since the early days of the discipline, beginning with, for instance, Jespersen (1924) or Bloomfield (1933). The reasons for this are both practical, countability has been called “locus of difficulty for English language learners” whose first language does not overtly express the countability distinction (Antes, 2019: 1), and also strictly intellectual as countability, because of its flexibility and its liminal position between syntax, morphology and semantics provides a fascinating window into the interaction between language, cognition and physical reality. It is, therefore, quite surprising that relatively little attention has been given to the diachronic development of the category in English and its functioning in Old English. Furthermore, the results of research which has dealt with the topic seem to be rather contradictory. Our study was, therefore, conceived as a baseline probe with the goal of establishing whether countability was a category distinguished in the Old English nominal system and, if so, to discern how it was formally expressed. The analysis confirmed that Old English did, in fact, indicate countability status in several ways, for example, pluralization patterns, quantifier and numeral collocability or in regard to the partitive phrase. The results, however, also suggest that countability was grammaticalised to a much lesser degree than it is in Present Day English and that the formal realisations were much more semantically determined.